


Running Hot and Cold

by rainfall



Category: Marvel (Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: All the headcanon forever, Blanket Fic, Fluff, Gen, Kid Fic, Oops Loki's a frost giant, Possibly Pre-Slash, ugh too much cute
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-25
Updated: 2014-01-25
Packaged: 2018-01-09 23:02:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1151842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainfall/pseuds/rainfall
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Loki rolled over onto his side and tugged the blankets up, over his shoulder, until they were tucked tightly beneath his chin.</p><p>It did no good: he could still feel the open air on his cheeks, on the back of his neck. He was still not warm.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Running Hot and Cold

Asgard's moons hung high in her star-speckled sky, the night dark and deep. Valaskjalf, and all within its walls, slept.

All within its walls, save one.

Loki rolled over onto his side and tugged the blankets up, over his shoulder, until they were tucked tightly beneath his chin.

It did no good: he could still feel the open air on his cheeks, on the back of his neck. He was still not warm.

The summer months had come and gone, and autumn too was over now; winter, desolate winter, had made Asgard its home. And where once Loki had slept comfortably with the lightest of sheets, always warm and sometimes hot, now he piled his bed high with furs and still struggled to keep out the chill of the night.

He should have made a fire and left it burning. Loki turned over again onto his other side and stared at the fireplace in the far corner of his room. Fire was simple enough -- he knew the runes, at least, even if he couldn't yet cast it with words or gesture alone...

But no. That would have been foolish. _Beyond_ foolish. Loki squeezed his eyes shut and reminded himself that fire was not _simple_ \-- it was cardinal. Primal. And once created, a living thing in its own right. He would _not_ be so arrogant as to create fire, tell it to burn through the night, and then turn his back.

Besides which, the fireplace was not nearly close enough to his bed. He might have been more comfortable in his room, but he would not have been _warm_.

Loki drew his knees slowly to his chest and pulled the blankets underneath them, sealing the air out completely. His hands, he slipped beneath his nightshirt, pressing them flat to his belly. As a last ditch resort, he squirmed deeper into his bed so that the blankets covered his chin, then his nose, then his eyes.

Curled up like that, he waited for it: for his own body heat to seep into his palms, to heat the bed beneath him.

By all rights, it should have worked.

But seconds turned to minutes, and though the air in his cocoon thinned until he felt suffocated, Loki still did not feel warm.

Finally he could bear it no longer. Shoving the blankets off, he sucked in deep lungfuls of air and stared resentfully up at the canopy above his bed.

It was dreadfully unfair. _Thor_ would have kept him warm.

Loki tried to pinch that thought off. He wasn't an _infant_ , and so when Father had announced that Thor would be moving out of the nursery and into his own proper rooms Loki had of course accepted it with grace. Much more grace than Thor himself had shown!

Yes, all right, the nursery _did_ seem inordinately big and lonely sometimes, but during the summer months he had taken comfort in the silence, the coolness of his sheets, knowing that he would not have to suffer through his brother's early morning energy or wake in the middle of the night to feel Thor slipping in beside him because he'd already sweated through his own sheets and was thoughtfully bringing that sweat to Loki.

But summer was over. Autumn was over. And now...

Now was the time when Thor had always _made up_ for being loud and sweaty and generally obnoxious the rest of the year round by being _warm_.

If Loki closed his eyes, he could almost feel it: heat, radiating from the huddled lump that was his brother in winter. Heat that he knew would pass right through their pajamas, sinking into his belly, into his bones. Nothing like the flickering, paltry thing his fireplace might have provided.

_Thor..._

Unfortunately, even as vivid as Loki's imagination was, the almost-feeling only left him more aware of the cold reality of his bed. He huffed out a breath.

Thor, like everyone else in the castle, would have been asleep by now. Earlier in the year would have seen him snoring on his belly, one arm draped over the side of the bed -- or else on his back, arms and legs flung wide like it was his personal mission in life to take up as much space as physically possible -- but in winter, Thor usually slept on his side, half curled up. Much less danger of snoring that way, which was yet another reason why winter had become Loki's favorite season for sharing a bed with his brother.

Somehow, without his knowledge or consent, his fingers had curled tightly into the blankets and Loki had to make a conscious effort to release them. It was dreadfully, _awfully_ unfair.

Loki told himself he was getting up for a drink of water, and then after he had passed the door to his adjoining washroom that he was getting up for a breath of fresh air. Or warm milk from the kitchens, perhaps -- it would have explained why he was heading away from the balconies -- but also meant he ought to have been keeping an eye out for servants.

And not ducking behind pillars to hide from them, as he was currently doing.

He went through another half dozen excuses before he finally reached the door to Thor's chambers, and he could have come up with twice that many. Three times, even four times. There were so many different reasons he could have come this way, and even one or two to explain why he lingered.

But none of the ones he had already thought of, and none of the ones he could hope to come up with, would explain why he wanted to knock on his brother's door.

Loki wrapped his arms around himself, rubbing for the friction. His winter dressing gown was lined with rabbit fur and more than thick enough to keep out the chill, but still when he imagined his brother's bulk, the careless arms he sometimes slung around Loki in his slumber... the hallway felt like ice by comparison.

Somewhere in the distance, footsteps. Loki went very still, listening, and realized they were coming from his left. His first paranoid thought -- that a chamber maid had looked in on him and discovered his empty bed -- was quickly dismissed; no chamber maid would have dared, and besides which his rooms were to the right. But the footsteps _were_ unmistakably heading in this direction, and he had no pillars here to hide behind.

Here was his excuse. Loki seized it and went into his brother's rooms as noiselessly as he could.

Already it seemed to him that Thor's rooms were warmer, though of course that could not have been _truly_ so. They were larger than the nursery he and Loki had shared, and this part of Valaskjalf was no less airy. Yet the illusion persisted.

In daylight, the room's hangings were vivid in crimson and silver, eagles carved into the mahogany of his bedposts. Thor's colors, Thor's motif... His rooms would be just as fine, Loki promised himself, and moved slowly -- silently -- to the edge of Thor's bed.

His eyes adjusted, he could make out the details now of his brother, curled up on his side, and Thor was every bit as deeply, carelessly, _obnoxiously_ asleep as he'd imagined.

Loki scowled for a moment. Then he went round to the other side of the bed -- which was far too large for either of them, at least for now -- and climbed into it.

That would have been enough, for him; he would have been awake and complaining already. But Thor slept on, oblivious, even as his bed creaked and trembled with the invasion. The only response he made at all was to shift very slightly and then snore.

 _Fool_ , Loki thought, and crept closer to him with less caution. The Einherjar would never accept him as their commander if they knew he was this easy to sneak up on. A warrior had to be completely aware of his surroundings at _all_ times. Especially when that warrior was otherwise completely defenseless. Loki would _never_ have let himself sleep so deeply. That they were in their father's castle, watched over by Heimdall's infallible sight and protected by Asgard's finest, was no excuse.

Yet Thor remained asleep, hardly stirring until Loki was almost pressed right up against him -- and even then he only jerked a little and mumbled something uncertainly. Giving an assassin more than enough time to slit his throat.

Loki only told him confidentially, "You're so bad at that."

More mumbling, followed by a sleepy chuckle. "Am I, then."

"Terrible. I could have killed you by now."

Thor turned round slowly, and for a horrible instant Loki thought he meant to pull away, but in the dim light he could see his brother was smiling. "Then I am fortunate you do not mean to kill me."

He said it with so little concern, as though even a real assassin would have given him no trouble. Loki snorted quietly. "You _are_ ," he insisted. "I should do it just to teach you a lesson."

"I am sure I'd be very remorseful in Valhalla." Thor's grin widened, but still he hadn't opened his eyes.

It was impossible to argue with someone so ridiculous. Loki said nothing, but his _huff_ must have been audible because Thor chuckled softly in response.

"Of course my death would exasperate you," he murmured, voice thickening with the sleep that was clearly coming on him once more, and in spite of everything Loki could feel his lips curving up.

He fought the urge for a moment, before deciding that since Thor couldn't see him and anyway was more than halfway back to sleep there was no harm in it. "Well, you're very exasperating," he said.

His brother made a noise that wasn't quite a laugh and wasn't quite a groan, then threw a lazy arm around Loki to pull him impossibly closer and _oh_ , how was he always so _warm_. Loki drew a startled breath and even that was full of _Thor_ , his brother's scent strong and rich and every bit as inescapable as the heat he could feel sinking all the way down into his bones.

"Good _night_ , Loki."

It should have been smothering. And truth be told, it _was_ , a little -- but Loki found to his great surprise that he did not mind.

He would move quickly in the morning. Slip back to his own chambers before first light, and leave no one the wiser -- possibly not even Thor, who after all had spent much of his trespass more than half asleep.

But for now...

Loki let his eyes slip shut, and the sleep that had so long eluded him came with remarkable ease.

**Author's Note:**

> In short: a frost giant's ridges are a sensory organ which lets him sense disturbances in the air around him with infinitely more precision than an Aesir. Loki still feels a muffled version of it beneath his Aesir glamour, which manifests as "not being harmed by cold" ( _Tales of Asgard_ made liberal use of here) and "being very difficult to sneak up on" ( _The Avengers_ and its throwaway line from Loki at Natasha). Evolutionarily-speaking, this is used for more effective hunting in a realm where game is quite scarce, but it also helps with general sense of direction and navigation of Jotunheim's (by comparison) vast barren wastes.
> 
> Even in the above fic, Loki isn't _really_ cold -- but he's not warm, and that's what he's learned to call cold over the course of his young life. c: His skin is also slightly cool to the touch and he generates less body heat overall, which is why Thor so appreciates his bed in the summer.


End file.
